Sunday, May 24, 2009

Sai Kung : 西貢

i so can't believe i had to attend a business dinner on a saturday night! wtf!but at least i could wear casual attire (mmm, that's a flash word) and sit outside, soaking (literally!) in the hot humid warm night air while drinking beer and eating fresh seafood!

my clients requested to go to sai kung (西貢); a popular fishing village famous for its seafood restaurants.

if you are going to make the trek out to sai kung you might as well come a bit earlier and explore the small village and check out the hive of activity at the wharf.many local people living nearby come here in the late afternoon to buy seafood directly from the little fishing boats lined up along the wharf.it's cool watching the sun weathered fishermen/women shouting out the names and prices of their quite often well stocked variety of sea creatures to us onlookers.when they finally snag a customer, next comes a entourage of haggling."i want the octopus with eight legs!""look, i'll sell you the octopus with five legs and throw in a clam for free. how about that?"

well not quite like that.but they do haggle at the price.

so once a price for the soon-to-be-slaughtered sea creature is agreed upon, the fishermen/women pluck it out from it's final home, whack it over the head, and then prepare to descale and gut it.at this stage you can usually spot the foreigners as they begin gasping in shock or whispering "oh the poor fishy...".look love, this is hong kong, as the saying goes: "we can eat everything that has four legs, except tables and chairs; everything that flies, except for airplanes, and everything that is found on water, except boats"

now that the fish is well and truly in the next life, it's placed in a plastic bag and lifted up by a net attached to a pole to the eagerly waiting customer on the wharf who then places some hard earned cash into the net to be lowered back down. quite a trusting system really when you come to think of it, i mean if you wanted to you could so just take the fish and run.of course that would never cross mr sekimachihato's mind. never.

then you have the restaurants lining the wharf.take your pick. they all look the same and basically sell the same seafood but some are more popular than others, so it's always a good move to pick the one with sweaty people waiting outside for a table.if you fainted watching the fish get whacked over the head then this might not be the place for you...again you have to pick you dinner as it swims around in a big aquarium-like tank.

while your dinner is being slaughtered prepared, sit back, drink some beer and take in the smells and enjoy the scenery of sai kung!

by the way, we had a tropical storm here in hong kong so sai kung really looked like this on saturday night... (the photos above were taken minus a tropical storm!)i enjoyed my seafood with a backdrop of thunder, lightning and torrential rain!

* Luuworldoh i know, i so wasn't in the mood to tackle that tropical storm on a saturday night especially when i was spread out on the sofa watching dvds! but being the loyal employee that i am i made the move...

what's that about you not liking seafood?!i must admit though i wasn't a big fan of seafood, but living in japan changed me and now i'm pretty good except for shellfish... a had a bad experience once that i don't want to repeat! (no, it wasn't the effect the oysters had on my...)

we have a mango pudding here in the shape of a carp, i'm sure you could manage that!

* GLyou so have to stop working on saturday!tell you boss to get with it!

fishing, i'm not a fishing type but i'm sure there are around some good spots in sai kung.there are tonnes of people fishing near my apartment on the weekend, you should try your luck there! as you sweat it out i'll wave down at you as i sip a cool beer in my aircon room *wink wink*